Electron Microscope

[Ploaf]

Here is a message regarding the continuing support of Electron Micsroscope from the author of the software LPerry from the HardOCP forum. I just copied it from the site and am pasting it here.

A proposal to the F@H and G@H Community
Because I am no longer going to contribute WU’s to the Stanford Folding and Genome projects until I’m satisfied that the majority of bugs they have in their system have been addressed and fixed, I am not planning on going any further in my support for the Electron Microscope series of applications.
Further, I never share my code unless someone pays me for it, so it won’t be released into the public domain. Because of the number of emails about future support and numerous requests for the code, I decided that I am willing to expend some effort and time to an EM III project. This is of course, providing the community is willing to support my efforts through either the shareware method or the outright purchase of the finished product by a person, persons, or company for a set price. I will work out the details with anyone willing to purchase the fully commented code to do with as they please.
The finished product would have a full-blown install using Install Shield, which if you visit their site isn’t a cheap product. The previous versions were written in such a way that only the Visual Basic 5 runtime library needed to be present in order to run. While this placed some limitations on what I could do, writing something that would be installed on the Windows system with registered controls, classes, etc. would allow me to overcome just about any problem encountered when using the current versions of EM. In fact, what I could produce for everyone would be a state of the art application with auto-update abilities and features I can’t currently add because I’m not using an installer program. While the new program would be a larger download, I would make sure that it used minimal CPU cycles and took up a minimum of system resources. It would of course have most, if not all, of the current abilities, plus many things it doesn’t currently support, including support for more than four instances of the programs. Even so, there would be a limit on the number of instances it could monitor, probably 1 or 2 hundred, as writing an open ended application saying it could support any number of instances is not only reckless, but stupid in my opinion. No one does that in the real world because it is an impossible scenario to test, and there are limits to everything, programs like this included, no matter how good the programmer.
I can’t promise a "perfect" application. It is impossible to write something that will run on 100% of the computers out there. I know I can write one that will run on at least 95% of them and I think I’ve proven already.
So, those of you that would support a shareware effort for say $18 with free upgrades and updates from a site I will set up and maintain, please send an email with Yes in the subject to:
Yes@weatherxpress.com
Feel free to add any other comments you might like to add.
If you are someone who would like to purchase the code and the finished product, send an email with Purchase in the subject to:
Code@weatherxpress.com
Please include your real name, company, contact info, hours, and anything else you feel is important for me to know before contacting you.
If you are not dead serious about either of the above, please do not send me an email. This is a 1 to 2 month in-depth project and I can’t afford to spend time on something this involved if I’m not going to be paid for it. That’s just reality. This will not be just a re-vamped version of the current EM programs. This will be a complete re-write from the ground up.
Lastly, why would anyone buy something that others have written for free? For the same reason 1,000’s of people over the years have purchased my stuff when other products doing similar things for free were available… because what I write is usually better and it is supported by someone who has been doing this for over 20 years.
I am going to post this message on the [H] site (when it’s up), on the Ars site, and on the DSL site. Feel free to cut and paste the entire contents of this post to any other forum you would like to see it posted on. Please don’t add to it.
Here is a link to this text on my personal site:
http://homepages.waymark.net/~lperry/FGproposal.htm
Thanks for your time.
Larry Perry
Aka The WeatherMan

[Ploaf]

I really don't know what to make of this, but I'm not sure I'm willing to buy EM for $18.

[asmodean]

I hate trying to interpret what he's written, so I won't. Suffice to say, I'm in no position to pay for a program that monitors a console client.

:(

[WillysNut]

I agree w/ the above posts. We can use Statsman to track progress. Sure, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles but I'm not willing to pay $18 bucks for a monitoring program either.

It's also possible that someone else may take a stab at a basic monitoring program like Folding Voyuer that could be used. Keeping my fingers crossed!

[T. J.]

Thanks for keeping us advised Ploaf. I have to say I'm inclined to agree about the cost. EM is nice, but I don't need it that much. Not that LPerry isn't entitled to be compensated for his work; its just that those of us who are serious about folding are already making a major contribution in terms of time, energy, electricity costs, sorting out problems with buggy new software, etc. I think this really needs the efforts of someone who is dedicated to F@H. I would support the efforts of anyone from our team who wants to try his hand at this by beta testing their software, donating some of my CPU cycles to his/her name, or perhaps making a small (like $5) cash contribution to the project. Anyone have the interest and the skills?

[hooziewhatsit]

I'll also have to agree, $18 is a little too much. Maybe if it was closer to $5....

I would be interested in trying to write a new EM, but I don't really have the skills needed. All the programing I have is a few terms of c++.

fold on!

[Ploaf]

My thought had been to buy the whole thing. Lock, stock and barrel from him once it was done and ask for donations to help cover the cost of buying and distributing it and then open up the source for more development but I don't know how much he would want for the whole thing. Even among the fah, gah, etc crowd I could imagine that donations would be hard to come by so I have pretty much tossed that idea out the window. The cost and effort of running a support/workgroup site would be a bit much too.
The other thing about it- Like T.J. said. He did put a lot of work into the program and he really owes us nothing. The work he did so far has been very much appreciated as we can tell by how many people here and other places used it, but we also put a lot of effort into this. Making sure our machines are running. Making sure the client is working the way it is supposed to. Giving up space on our machines and if possible, upgrade or rebuild or build from scratch systems for this endeavor. Staying up to make sure that the work gets sent back. Trying to find ways to work around the server outages, etc.
I guess it's a toss up. In the end if he did do it that way I might just flip a coin. Besides. He did show a screenshot of what he was working on and it looked a lot better. Heads or tails?

[asmodean]

I liked the small window showing the protein being folded, but not the rest. The current EM for F@H v1 looks good enough for me, albeit it's a bit limited. I hardly ever skin for any of the programs I use. WinAmp is the only one that needs skinning and I haven't used it for a month...

I'd love to start a new programming project... But as it stands, I don't know squat about programming for Windows, I don't have the tools and it'd propably take quite long before I could put out a public version...

Now I'm looking at the KDFold program that has a thread @ [H] forums. Maybe that'll become useable for v2 F@H.

I've downloaded the monitoring program written in Perl, but decided not to even try it, because Perl is an interpreted programming language, therefore slow and a resource hog, when compared to C/C++ programs.

All in all, LPerry has done great work with EM, but now we need something new, it seems.

[Ploaf]

KD Fold looks very interesting and it may hold the most promise even if it just leads to something else. I loved it and used it extensively for 1.34 and the source is available to look at. It was done in Delphi, so you would need a delphi envirnoment to work with it.